Sun setting on historic launch site

British astronaut Tim Peake. Photo / AP

British Major Tim Peake , American astronaut Timothy Kopra and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, will climb into a tiny capsule tomorrow and wait for the huge engines of a Soyuz rocket beneath them to ignite.

People for hundreds of miles around will watch a flaming dot rise from near the town of Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

For Peake, this nail-biting moment is the beginning of a 173-day orbital odyssey aboard the International Space Station, and the culmination of years of painstaking training to become Britain's first "official" astronaut.

Workers prepare the Russian Soyuz TMA-19M spaceship. Photo / AP

It will also see him join an exclusive club of more than 200 men and women who have begun their journeys into space from the same launch pad since Yuri Gagarin blasted off in 1961.

That tradition began in 1955, when a small group of Soviet surveyors pitched camp on the north bank of the Syr Darya, the vast glacier-fed river that irrigates the Central Asian desert. Impossibly remote and with clear skies most of the year, it was selected as the ideal location to build the top-secret missile testing range that became the birthplace of the Soviet space programme.

But the base's long-term future in is doubt. Baikonur, handed to Russia on a long-term lease from newly independent Kazakhstan after the breakup of the Soviet Union, is likely to be handed back one day.

Russia is building a new space centre in its far east. If it is ever completed, the relocation of Russia's space programme could be the death knell of its birthplace.

"Gorbachev said, 'Baikonur will live long, it will live forever'. But we have to admit we don't really have that feeling now," said Viktor Kuleyepotov, a former test engineer. "But I'm an optimist. Space travel will continue."